The European Dream Read Online Free PDF

products with long life cycles, allowing them to amortize their costs while maintaining centralized control over research and development, production schedules, and distribution channels. And the slow pace of discrete and discontinuous market exchanges was still sufficient to keep up with consumer demand.
    In the past twenty years, a number of factors have changed the commercial context. The dramatic increase in the cost of energy, the escalating costs and risks associated with research and development, the ever shorter life cycle of goods and services, increased labor costs, the consumer preference for more customized just-in-time products, global competition, and smaller profit margins have all contributed to making the market-exchange and hierarchical models increasingly obsolete.
    Global commerce is becoming more dense and sped up. No single firm can effectively compete as an autonomous agent working solely through a market-exchange mechanism. Today, going it alone is a prescription for extinction. Only by pooling resources and sharing risks and revenue streams in network-based relationships can firms survive. This means giving up some autonomy in return for the entrepreneurial advantages and security that come with networked arrangements. While competition still exists among firms—markets aren’t disappearing any time soon—cooperation in the form of outsourcing, co-sourcing, gain-sharing, and shared saving agreements are increasingly becoming the norm.
    In a globalized economy where everyone is connected and ever more interdependent, the idea of autonomous free agents maximizing their individual self-interests in simple exchange transactions in markets seems woefully out of date. A network, in a very real sense, is the only corporate model capable of organizing a world of such speed, complexity, and diversity.
    Although the network model is becoming more popular, little attention has been paid to the way networks change our very concept of the role of property and the philosophy of commerce. There has been even less discussion of the long-term implications that flow from a deep change in personal behavior that goes with the transition to the new economic model.
    The first thing to understand about the shift from markets to networks is that borders become less fixed and more porous. In markets, borders are critical. A possession is an extension of one’s personal territory. It is exclusive to the owner. Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, wrote that property is “that despotic dominion that one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” 13
    In a market-based regime, property is rarely meant to be shared but only possessed or exchanged. The status of property is unimpeachable. It is either “mine or thine.” The time and place of the exchange between seller and buyer represent the frontier where the property leaves one hand and is transferred into another. The negotiation of the transaction is an adversarial event. Both parties hope to gain at the other’s expense. That’s why it’s called competition. To win is to come away from the exchange with greater value in personal holdings. The goal of market exchange of property is to enlarge one’s territorial dominion.
    In networks, both physical and intellectual property stay with the producer and are shared with one or more other parties. Knowledge, information, and know-how, which are all forms of property, are similarly shared. What’s mine is also thine. The clear territorial boundaries that mark private property regimes in an age of market transactions melt. What was once a frontier separating the parties becomes common ground. Unlike market exchanges, which are expected to result in winners and losers, in network relationships, shared activity is expected to result in what is now called “win-win” situations.
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